The Daily Bulletin reported last week that the city of Pomona owes $5.8 million to six families in the Phillips Ranch area of Pomona after losing a lawsuit.
The affected homes suffered damages from land movement in an open space area owned by the city. The Bulletin's Monica Rodriguez explained:
The families first realized there was a problem when they started seeing cracks in the floors of their homes and yards in February 2005 after a period of heavy rains.
The cracks grew quickly. Before long, they turned into gaps and drops of as much as 2 feet.
During the trial, information was presented that in the late 1970s and early 1980s engineers for the builder of the homes found an ancient landslide, said Michael A. Hearn, the lawyer representing the families.
The engineers produced a report that went to the city and recommended the landslide be removed and the area regraded, Hearn said.
The city approved a plan that left much of the old unstable landslide and area dedicated to the city for open space, he said.
"The judge found that when the city accepted the land, it accepted the liability," Hearn said.
Rodriguez went on to report that the plaintiffs had argued that city had stopped monitoring the area for gophers, which allowed the gopher population to run wild, opening holes in the slide area that made it easier for rainwater to seep into the ground, undermining the area. As the open space land moved, it affected the homes in question.
Pomona City Attorney Arnold Alvarez-Glasman indicated in the article that the city would appeal the decision. There's a lively discussion of this issue over at the M-M-M-My Pomona blog, where K has posted some thoughts on the matter.
K has a hard time seeing any liability on the part of the city of Pomona, and he seems to argue that the homeowners assumed the risk posed by a landslide when they bought their homes:
How on earth is it that the owner of a great big empty hillside (empty, because it can't be built upon due to fear of landslides) is responsible for maintaining the hillside so it doesn't slide or endanger the millions of dollars worth of real estate perched above the hillside!? Call me crazy, but I'd assume that the folks on top of the hill would have a strong interest in maintaining the integrity of the hillside, rather than the folks who own the (relatively) worthless hillside land. Especially when the folks on top picked the hillside location due to the great views.
This whole thing seems to us a lot like the city of Claremont's situation with the Palmer Canyon homeowners following the 2003 Padua Fire. In that instance, the homeowners argued that the city-owned Wilderness Park was not maintained according to Claremont's own Vegetation Management Plan for the Wilderness Park, allowing dangerous amounts of fuel to accumulate.
Claremont, and the Claremonsters, argued that it was the homeowners' own fault that their homes burned. They should have known Palmer Canyon was a fire area, the thinking goes.
Claremont, however, must have seen the writing on the wall in the Palmer Canyon lawsuit. Their attorneys and their insurer, the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority, settled the suit for $17.5 million.
Just because a land is open space does not absolve the owner of the land, in these cases the cities of Claremont and Pomona and the taxpayers funding those municipalities, from maintaining the land so that it does not damage neighboring properties.
In Pomona's case, for instance, they could have exterminated the gophers to control the population. Even if you think the plaintiffs' arguments were spurious, taking care of the gophers would have eliminated the argument that the holes allowed the hill to be undermined. In the same way, if the city of Claremont had simply cleared the brush around Palmer Canyon, as their own formal policies said they would, the plaintiffs would not have been able to make some of the key arguments in their case.
The moral of the story is that there are additional costs to preserving open space that cities need to take into account. The costs merely begin with land acquisition. With ownership comes responsibility, and cities, no less than individual property owners, are accountable for damages caused by their negligence.
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